


If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going

by HeroOfTheLostCause



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Dark, End of the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 21:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1164468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeroOfTheLostCause/pseuds/HeroOfTheLostCause
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been two months since the Night Everything Changed, two months since Derek and Stiles have been on the run, on the road.</p>
<p>It’s been two months since Stiles last saw his father, Scott, Allison, Lydia, Jackson, since he last knew if they were alive or dead. In fact, he hasn’t seen anyone other than Derek, and a few shadowy, wolf-like figures in the distance, late at night, when Derek is outside to keep them safe.</p>
<p>It’s been two months since Stiles slept in a real bed, or ate something that wasn’t beef jerky or dried fruit or power bars. He hasn’t showered in weeks or washed his one pair of jeans and three shirts, and he smells gamey, the same way he used to smell after Boy Scouts camping trips as a kid.</p>
<p>It’s been two months since the wolves came, and two months since Stiles last slept through the night without worrying about dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going

When Stiles wakes up in the back seat of his Jeep, it’s uncomfortably warm and the radio is silent as always. Derek stands outside, squinting into the rising sun, partially turned away, rifle hanging from his left shoulder. Stiles unlocks his door and climbs out into the dry air.

“Ready to go?”

“You shouldn’t get out of the car, Stilinski.”

“It’s light out. They’re not here anymore.”

Derek shrugs, not even looking over. “Still dangerous.” His voice is weary, hoarse with exhaustion, and the rings under his eyes are bigger than Stiles remembers.

“Let’s go.”

He’s not anxious because of the weres, although Stiles has had dreams that they come out during the day, when there aren’t moons in the sky. He’s anxious because Derek looks dead on his feet and Derek is the only reason he’s still alive.

Wordlessly, Derek gets into the passenger seat, and leans his head back, eyes closed. His face is streaky with dirt and with sweat from patrolling late at night. The wrinkles are getting deeper too, not that Stiles really notices or cares about Derek’s wrinkles and worry lines. He needs to shave; they both need to shave. For the first time in his life, Stiles has stubble dotting his cheeks and jaw. It’s patchy at best, not a proper beard like Derek has. Stiles is proud all the same. But shaving isn’t something they have time for, not when all their energy has to go to surviving.

He swings into the driver’s seat, clicks the lock switch down, for safety. That’s Derek’s idea. All the safety precautions, always wearing seatbelts, no radio, coasting down hills, keeping the doors locked even during the daytime, cutting his brake lights, Derek came up with them all. Stiles is sure that if he could, Derek would make sure the engine didn’t make a sound, but Derek isn’t a mechanic, and the Jeep is old and noisy. That’s why Derek makes Stiles pull over to the side of the road, always in a clear area that’s high up, as soon as it starts to get dark. It’s for their own safety, he says, and Stiles mostly believes him. Sometimes, it can get boring, driving slowly for hours with nobody to talk to.

“Which way?”

Derek opens one of his eyes and points down the hill they’re parked on and to the right, back to the same stretch of highway they’ve been driving on for a week. His eyes are bloodshot and he can barely keep them open. Stiles would say something, but he knows how Derek can get.

Stiles turns the Jeep on, ignores how Derek winces at the sound of the engine out of exhaustion and annoyance, and slowly starts down the hill, foot gently resting against the brake. Around them, the highway is flat and straight for miles, as far as the eye can see, and Stiles wants to go fast, see if he can push his old car to 80, 90, 100, miles per hour, but doesn’t. He never goes above 40, because the Jeep goes through gas like a fiend, and it is one of Derek’s dumb survival rules, and gas stations are few and far between around here, in the middle of Wyoming or Nebraska or North Dakota, whichever flyover state they’re currently driving in. The tank’s just under half empty or half full or whatever, but Derek had the foresight to steal a couple of gallons of oil at the last gas station they stopped at. Stiles estimates that they have just under a week before they’re going to need to stop and refuel, but he hopes they’ll find a station that still has gas before that.

\--

Derek sleeps while Stiles drives, the rings finally starting to fade from under his eyes, his breathing slow and steady. Sometimes, he whines low in the back of his throat and twitches, as if he is a dog, and sometimes, but very rarely, he’ll groan and jerk against his seatbelt before settling back down. Whenever he does, Stiles wonders what he’s dreaming about, if he’s haunted by nightmares of the Night When Everything Changed, by the dead bodies they’ve come across, the empty cars and houses, the dried blood on sidewalks and roads, if he has the same nightmares that plague Stiles every time he closes his eyes.

\--

It’s been two months since the Night Everything Changed, two months since Derek and Stiles have been on the run, on the road. Stiles keeps track by the number of moons they’ve gone through, the six times Derek has come back to the Jeep bleeding and paler than normal, the six times Derek slept through the day without waking up once.

It’s been two months since Stiles last saw his father, Scott, Allison, Lydia, Jackson, since he last knew if they were alive or dead. In fact, he hasn’t seen anyone other than Derek, and a few shadowy, wolf-like figures in the distance, late at night, when Derek is outside to keep them safe.

It’s been two months since Stiles slept in a real bed, or ate something that wasn’t beef jerky or dried fruit or power bars. He hasn’t showered in weeks or washed his one pair of jeans and three shirts, and he smells gamey, the same way he used to smell after Boy Scouts camping trips as a kid.

It’s been two months since the wolves came, and two months since Stiles last slept through the night without worrying about dying.

\--

_It had started with a phone call from his dad. Stiles was busy, watching TV and pretending to do his trigonometry homework, and let the phone keep ringing. It was a Wednesday evening, just after sundown, and the sheriff was probably just running late. He often did run late, and Stiles was used to making his own dinner and having the night to himself, waking up only when the sheriff came home and woke him up and told him to go to his own bed._

_If he had known better, Stiles would have answered the phone instead of turning the TV up even louder to drown out the ringing. After all, it was the last chance he ever had to talk to his father, not that he knew it._

_But he did ignore the telephone and his homework, falling asleep on the sofa as the regularly scheduled programming came to an end and the warning started flashing on the screen. The phone kept ringing for a few hours until it finally fell silent. Stiles never knew if it was because his father was dead, or if his father thought he was dead._

\--

_He woke up with a crick in his neck and spooning a pillow, drool in the corner of his mouth, and the TV screen grey and filled with static. Stiles groaned and checked his watch. It was just past noon and on a Thursday. On any other day, he would be stuck in the middle of chemistry, kicking Scott to keep him awake. On any other day, his father would have woken up with a shake and a reminder that he had school in a few hours._

_The phone flashed. Inbox full. Stiles picked it up, clicked the talk button, and put the phone on speaker as he got up and stretched._

_“Stiles, it would be nice if you picked up the phone once in a while. What if there was actually an emergency? We are going to talk about this when you get home.”_

_“Stiles? It’s your dad. I’m going to be running late tonight. Something came up. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”_

_“Stiles? Are you there? Things are kind of crazy, but I should be home within the next hour. Just to be safe, lock all the doors.”_

_“Stiles? Please pick up. I need to talk to you. This is very important, and I need you to stay safe. Call me back as soon as you get this, okay?”_

_“Stiles, turn off all the lights, lock all the doors, and my gun is in the top dresser drawer. The bullets are in the bathroom. If anything happens, get the gun and wait for me to get home.”_

_“Stiles, if you are still there… if you are still alive… I don’t think I’m going to come home tonight, and I want to say goodbye. I love you.”_

_Stiles played that message over and over, volume fully up, listening for a different clue each time, the panic in his father’s voice, the shouts and gunshots in the background._

_There was one more message, but his father wasn’t in it. It was just static and then snuffling and then silence until the phone beeped off, out of battery._

_He closed his eyes and pinched his arm. But Stiles knew that this wasn’t a dream, that something had happened, something bad, and that his dad was never going to come home. The reasonable part of Stiles told him to try to find a channel on the TV, or turn on the radio, but the impulsive part of him said the gun was the best idea._

_When he had the gun tucked into the front of his jeans, Stiles walked around the house one last time, turning off the lights and locking up before climbing into the Jeep and driving toward the police station to find his father._

\--

_Derek found him nearly four hours later, driving around aimlessly and crying._

\--

Three days later, and nearly out of gas, the Jeep coasts into a small town outside of Provo, Utah.

Stiles drives around the streets slowly until he sees an abandoned Shell station. The paint is peeling off the sign. He pulls into one of the pumps and reaches into the cup holder, for his dad’s pistol, the pistol that he keeps tucked safely into his waistband every time he leaves the safety of his car.

The gas station, like every other gas station they’ve encountered, is empty, nozzles swinging gently in the wind, banging against the pumps every few seconds. Everything is covered with a thin layer of dust, and Stiles absently wipes his hands on his jeans. They’re dirty enough as is, unwashed, faded, starting to get worn and frayed around the hem and pockets and knees. Another smudge of dust isn’t going to make much of a difference at this point. The idea of not being grimy, coated in a thin layer of dirt and sweat at all times, seems almost foreign now.

Derek taught him how to get gas out of the pump without paying, not that Stiles wants to know where he learned how. The cop’s son in Stiles makes him want to wince or look away, werewolf apocalypse be damned, every time Derek steals gas and food or breaks into empty cars to see if there’s an extra gun in the glove compartment. But the first time he complained, Derek just gave him a dirty look and broke another car window to steal empty water bottles.

It’s Stiles’s job to fill the car and the empty gas cans, to make sure the tires are full, clean the windows off, check the engine, make sure the Jeep can keep on going for a few more days, a few more weeks until they reach safety, if safety still exists. It’s the easy shit, the shit that someone who can’t survive on their own has to do.

It’s Derek’s job to steal food and water and whatever else they might need. He breaks windows or picks locks, grabs whatever they might need and whatever will last the longest. Sometimes, if the gas station convenience stores are well stocked, Derek will grab extra shirts or socks for them, pocketknives or first aid kits or blankets if they have any.

Derek grabs the old-fashioned shotgun from the trunk of the Jeep and heads over to the abandoned store. He loads it, the clicks shockingly soothing in the silence. The windows are broken, and Stiles hopes that it’s from some weres, and not other survivors who got here first. There was still gas left in the pump, so Stiles figures the broken windows are just collateral damage from the full moon and maybe there will be something good they can scavenge.

Stiles leans against his car as the tank fills and Derek loots the gas station store for food and water. It’s still warm, even for early November, and the sun beats down on the back of his neck. Maybe he’s even tan, although it could just be dirt. Still, there’s an unmistakable chill in the air, and Stiles hopes his sweatshirt and the Jeep’s heating system is going to be enough to make them through the winter or that Derek can find them some warmer clothes. It might not get especially cold in Beacon Hills but Stiles remembers college visits with his dad and how miserably cold it could get in New England over Thanksgiving. They aren’t even in New England yet, but he remembers reading something about deserts getting miserable in the winter. Absently, he wonders if they are going to have turkey jerky or dried cranberries on Thanksgiving, if either of them will even remember the holiday, or if it will just slip away unnoticed. Stiles figures it’s the latter, because holidays don’t mean anything when they’re trying to survive.

Still, having something festive once in a while would be nice.

\--

They get a good haul out of the convenience store, better than Stiles was expecting. The trunk of the Jeep is filled with bags of jerky, trail mix, two flats of water, even a bag of baby carrots. Derek found ammunition for all three guns, and he settles himself in the backseat, cleaning and reloading the guns.

“Pull over.” Stiles nearly lets go of the wheel in shock, but does as Derek tells him, because Derek is the one with the guns and the survival skills.

“Why?”

“CVS.”

It’s the first drugstore they’ve seen since the Night Everything Changed, and Stiles is at the point where he bites his pills in half to make them last longer. Half a pill a day isn’t much, and he’s finding it harder and harder to focus when he drives or to sleep at night. Derek’s started to notice, not saying anything but biting down his lip every time Stiles drums his fingers or starts jabbering about whatever’s in his head.

“Stay in the car. Keep the doors locked. I’ll be right back.”

The sun is starting to go down, and it may not be a full moon yet, but Stiles isn’t going to disagree. It would be a waste of time. He crawls into the backseat, nearly getting tangled over the gearshift, and tumbles to the ground in a jumble of pale limbs. At least, he thinks to himself, Derek didn’t have to see that, because Derek would never let him hear the end of it.

Even though the world is ending, Derek still can find time to snark and mock Stiles.

\--

Through the car window, Stiles watches Derek in the twilight as he walks towards the pharmacy. It’s only once Derek’s gone inside does Stiles realize two things. The first is that all three guns are in the backseat with him and that means Derek is completely unarmed, and the second is it’s the day before the full moon and if there are any weres in the area, they’re going to be out tonight.

For a few seconds, Stiles is about to grab two guns and go after Derek, but he knows Derek would probably kill him for going outside at night, and that Derek can take care of himself without Stiles getting in the way.

Instead he sinks lower down in the back seat of the Jeep and waits for something, anything to happen. It’s like watching a horror movie, a train wreck, and Stiles can’t tell if it’s from the stress or the ADHD kicking in worse than ever. Maybe, he decides, as his hands curl into fists so tight that his fingernails leave little crescent moons in his palms and his knuckles go white, it’s both. He hopes that Derek is fast, that he comes back soon, before it gets completely dark outside, before it is too late.

The moon rises slowly into the night sky, white and plump.

Stiles feels sick.

\--

After what feels like hours, but really can’t be more than minutes, Derek comes out of the CVS with a white plastic bag. Stiles unclenches his hands and in that moment of excitement, he forgets where he is and opens the door to the Jeep and goes outside. Moonlight bathes the empty parking lot an eerie white. The night air is chilly, and Stiles shivers slightly, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

He doesn’t know why he’s outside, or what he’s going to do, if he is going to hug Derek or just grab the white bag or what. But he’s outside now, outside the relative safety of the Jeep, and like Derek, he is unarmed.

“What the hell are you doing?” Derek’s voice is almost a growl. It scares Stiles. He’s never heard Derek talk like that.

“I…”

“Get back in the car.”

Stiles pauses for just a second too long, and suddenly he feels Derek slamming against him, pushing him into the side of the Jeep hard enough to break the skin on the center of his back, where he hit the door handle. The breath is knocked out of him and tears fill his eyes, tears that he quickly blinks away.

“Get. Back. In. The. Car. Now.” Derek shoves the bag into Stiles’s hands and lets go of him. His eyes are wide and look… different.

Stiles claws the door open and scrambles into the backseat. The door slams back behind him, and, hands shaking, Stiles punches the lock down. He winces, biting back a yelp, when his back presses against the seat, and looks around for Derek. Derek is outside, standing still, eyes narrowed, whole body tensed up, dog-like, looking around for something that Stiles cannot see but feels scared about all the same.

“Derek! Come on, man! Get in the car!” Stiles doesn’t mean for his voice to get so high, so piercing.

“Shut up, Stilinski.” Derek closes his mouth and turns away sharply, but Stiles can see his eyes. It hits him like a ton of bricks, why he thought Derek’s eyes looked wrong. 

It’s only for a second, but it’s more than enough time to see how red his eyes have gotten, or how his teeth have started to lengthen or how his body is contorting now as if in pain or how his hair begins to spread across his face.

Someone, or something howls. Derek turns around, just as two weres come tearing down the street and crash into him.

\--

The next morning, Stiles grabs the rifle and climbs out of the Jeep. Someone, or something, slashed up the tires with its claws or teeth, and Derek and the weres are gone. There isn’t a trace of anything, blood or fur or torn clothing.

It’s as if Derek never existed.

\--

Stiles spends the next two nights in the Jeep, doors locked, mostly awake, holding the rifle in his lap, waiting for them to come back, for them to kill him. He waits until the moon starts to shrink, but Derek never comes back, and neither do the other two werewolves.

\--

After the three days of waiting for Derek, Stiles realizes that if he doesn’t move on soon, he’s going to die with his Jeep in the middle of nowhere in Utah. Stiles never really thought about how he was going to die, but this isn’t it. If he’s going to die, it’s going to be a glorious, heroic sort of death, even though that doesn’t seem very likely anymore.

He waits until the sun is high in the sky, and then walks to the CVS, pistol in his right hand. There hasn’t been any movement for three days, but he’s still wary, still worried that someone or something will attack him. If it’s not a were, it could be another survivor, starving, hungry, desperate for ammo and water and all the other stuff Stiles has stored in his Jeep. Or it could be Derek, waiting for him so they can keep going, but Stiles pushes that thought out of his mind. He doesn’t want to be let down.

Still, he can’t help but keep looking over his shoulders and checking every corner of the CVS once he gets inside, gun drawn, finger curled over the trigger to shoot at anything that moves.

\--

The CVS is, not to Stiles’s surprise, empty of people. He moves down the aisles slowly, warily, waiting for another human who isn’t there. As he goes through the store, he grabs things he thinks he might need, a sweatshirt, a backpack, blankets, band aids, more toothpaste, pain killers, multi-vitamins, as much stuff as he can carry in his arms. Most of it isn’t necessary, and that’s why, in the past, Derek did all the shopping or stealing, for the two of them, but Stiles doesn’t care. He misses juice packets, and he misses clean socks and underwear, and he misses shaving. Anyway, Derek is long gone, and Stiles is the one in charge now. Being in charge means he can make all the dumb decisions that he wants

He steals a cart from the front of the store and dumps his newfound treasures in it, and pushes it back to the car, and then loads the food and water and his sleeping bag and all the guns and ammunition and the meds Derek found for him into the cart. He puts the extra clothes, and some power bars and a bottle of water into the backpack and swings it onto his shoulders.

It’s time to head out.

\--

Weirdly enough, saying goodbye to the Jeep is the hardest part. Stiles always knew that parting with his car, his shitty old car, would be rough, but he never thought he’d miss the damn thing so much.

\--

He walks through the night, using the stars and the white lines on the road to guide him, and keeps walking until the sun has fully risen and he can find a nice grassy area that’s sheltered enough from the road to eat something and sleep for a few hours. There’s plenty of grass and flat land, but it isn’t exactly sheltered. Derek’s drilled him enough to know shelter is key to survival. Stiles dreads when he makes it to the proper flyover states, where there aren’t even hills or trees to hide him from weres. Maybe he can sleep in cornfields, and use husks as a pillow, like they did in the colonial ages or whatever. Maybe weres won’t go searching through tall grass for something to eat. Maybe Stiles will see those he loves again.

Stiles eventually finds a nice tree to sleep under and pulls his cart off to the side of the road. He jams rocks under the wheels of his shopping cart so it doesn’t roll away while he’s sleeping, and he opens his bottle of water and drinks half of it down without stopping. His mouth s dry and dusty from walking all night and part of the day, and his whole body aches. His stomach hurts as soon as he’s done but it’s a good kind of hurt and at least he isn’t thirsty anymore.

Since Derek isn’t here to yell at him about balancing carbs and proteins and vitamins, Stiles wolfs down five handfuls of trail mix and a chocolate bar. It’s the first chocolate he’s had in weeks, since the Night Everything Changed. He eats it and licks his lips until he can’t taste anymore, and then he licks his fingers and the candy bar wrapper for good measure, before climbing into his sleeping bag and drifting off into a much-needed sleep.

\--

Although it would kill Stiles to admit it, he misses Derek, and his brooding silence and presence. Something about Derek made him feel safe and secure, and that feeling is gone now. He also misses his Jeep, and air conditioning, and not having blisters on his feet that burst and bleed. His socks are crusted with blood, his shirts soaked with sweat, his hair caked with grease, his jaw covered in the first beard he has ever grown in his life. Under normal circumstances, Stiles would be thrilled, but the beard is itchy and he hates it. Even his belt doesn’t fit him anymore, and on its tightest setting is too loose. One day, before passing out asleep, he uses his knife to make extra holes so his jeans don’t slide off.

The juice is the first to go, sweet and delicious, making him thirstier with every sip, and attracting ants and wasps. Even though it’s cold, nearly freezing, there are still bugs, lazily flying around and driving him mad. Stiles hates to dump the bottles he has left on the side of the road, but the not having the bugs following him, biting him is worth it. It’s a waste of good resources, something Derek would yell at him about, but Stiles doesn’t care. He will miss the sweetness, and he knows it’s only a matter of days until he gets sick of drinking water, and will want to throw it out too but can’t. He might hate water, how warm it gets in the plastic bottles in the sun, but he likes living more.

Second to go is the shirt he wore on the Night Everything Changed. It’s one of his old Beacon Hills lacrosse shirts with the seams already starting to separate, and Stiles should have thrown it out long ago, but couldn’t bring himself to get rid of one of the few things left from his former life, one of the few things that ever so vaguely smells like home. On the Night Everything Changed, the collar got mostly ripped off, when Derek threw him into the Jeep, but Stiles kept it all the same because it reminded him of Scott and Allison and Danny and Lydia and his dad and even Jackson.

Stiles ends up burying the shirt, like it’s a dead friend, and in a way the shirt is. His friends are probably dead, and this is the closest he will ever come to saying goodbye to them.

It makes him feel a little less guilty, at least.

\--

At night, Stiles watches the moon, to see how big it is, how close to full it is becoming. As soon as the moon is bright enough to see by, Stiles stops traveling and starts looking for a good place to hide when it’s time for the weres to shift from man to monster. He finds a ravine where a river might have been once upon a time. It’s got trees and some shelter, so he hides his cart and sets up his bedroll and sleeps before the moon comes up for the first night.

He doesn’t sleep while the weres are out. It’s not like he ever hears them howling or snarling, which is good, because then they’d be far too close for comfort, but he’s too nervous to sleep for those three days. As far as he knows, they don’t come out during the day, but he can’t be too careful. For three days, he sits cross-legged on his sleeping bag, leaning against a dead tree, eyes drooping from exhaustion, pistol in one hand, shotgun across his lap, and rifle next to his knee. Whenever he feels himself drifting off, he pinches his arm and eats a handful of trail mix to boost his energy a little.

After the moon starts to become small again, Stiles sleeps for nearly two days straight and doesn’t care that something could kill him at night. When he wakes up, for a few seconds he thinks he’s in the backseat of the Jeep and it’s time to start driving, but then he remembers where he is and that he’s all alone. It’s been weeks since he’s last spoken to another human being and whenever he tries to talk, his throat is dry and hurts.

He rolls his sleeping bag up and finds his shopping cart and checks his inventory, and realizes he only has a week of water left. It’s been nearly two weeks since he last saw a house, let alone a gas station or market.

Drinking so much water earlier was a mistake.

\--

A few days after the moon, it begins to snow. Stiles doesn’t have any real winter clothes, just his sneakers, which are about to fall apart, his toes already peeking out, and a few long sleeved shirts and a sweatshirt he stole from CVS. He wears them all and wraps his worn shoes in plastic bags and duct tape and puts his least bloody socks over his hands instead of gloves. It’s a sad excuse for staying warm and within a few hours, Stiles is chilled to be bone.

It’s late December or early January; he’s lost track of the days and weeks and doesn’t really care that he missed Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe even New Year’s. He cares about surviving and not freezing to death. When he’s awake, he’s moving enough to stay warm, but he’s always cold when he goes to sleep. In the end, he wears all his clothes to bed and stuffs his sleeping bag with as many blankets as he can fit in, but it’s never quite enough. Even moving around isn’t enough to starve off the cold.

The snow won’t stop falling. The shopping cart keeps on getting stuck in snow drifts or flipping over. The one upside Stiles can see is that the snow is a fine substitute for water. He puts handfuls into his mouth whenever he becomes thirsty, not giving a damn if it’s clean or dirty, and fills all his empty water bottles with it. Maybe, when it gets warm again, the snow will melt into water. Of course, it only matters if Stiles is still alive by then. He doubts he can make it through the winter at this rate.

His food is starting to dwindle. Most days, if he walks, he will eat a power bar or two, dried fruit, maybe even a handful of mixed nuts, just enough to keep him going. On the days when he can’t get the cart to go, or is too tired to try, he eats dried fruit and crackers with peanut butter, and will thaw baby carrots in his hands and eat them too. He hates himself for eating so much when the weather was warm, when he still had body fat to burn and wasn’t afraid of freezing to death at night. Now, when his stomach aches so much that he wants to double over in pain, he will chew on air in an attempt to trick his body into thinking it has been fed.

That little trick rarely works.

\--

One day, or night, it’s snowing too hard for him to tell if the sun is in the sky or if the moon is close to full, Stiles falls down into a snow bank and can’t get back up for several minutes. It’s then that he realizes his body is falling apart and he is starting to die. Oddly enough, he feels at peace, and manages to pull himself back to his feet and keeps trudging along, pushing the cart through the snow drifts.

There’s something about knowing he’s dying that pushes Stiles to keep going. Maybe he wants to prove his body and death wrong. Or maybe he just wants to find a secluded space to die in peace, somewhere where the weres won’t eat his corpse.

He falls down again, and the snow feels warm and soft around him. He wants to go to sleep, but he knows going to sleep means he will die and he isn’t ready to die out in the middle of nowhere. He’s so tired, and the snow is so soft, and a little nap won’t kill him. The cold metal of the shopping cart that cuts through his sock mittens wakes him up, and Stiles does his best to get back up, leaning heavily against the cart, shaking from the effort of standing still.

Eventually, Stiles stops and digs a small indentation in the snow, barely big enough for him to sit in. He builds the sides up about a foot, and then climbs in, wrapping himself in his sleeping bag and all the blankets he has left. It’s not much, and he doesn’t feel any warmer, but he hopes it’s going to be enough to keep from freezing to death when he sleeps. He eats twice as much as he normally would, so his body has something to metabolize, so it can keep warm for the few hours that he will sleep for. His belly aches as soon as he’s done, but it’s a good pain. It’s a pain that reminds him he’s still alive.

Stiles curls up into a ball on the ground, shivering. Unlike earlier that day, the snow is no longer warm. He feels the tears in his eyes and closes them before they can freeze on his face. Hopefully, it won’t hurt too much. Hopefully, he will be fast asleep when he dies tonight.

\--

“Wake up. Wake up, Stilinski.”

Stiles thinks he’s dreaming, or maybe dead, because someone is shaking his shoulder and yelling at him and slapping his face none too gently. He opens an eye, half expecting to see the angel of his mom or realize it’s daytime and he has back in his room in Beacon Hills and everything is back to normal. He’s not expecting to see Derek scowl down at him.

“What?” Stiles blinks blearily and shifts away slowly, far too slowly. He’s confused and everything hurts.

Derek shakes his head and pulls Stiles up to his feet. “What were you doing? Do you want to freeze to death, or something?” He starts to rub Stiles’s arms and back and Stiles is too confused to pull away.

“Where… What? What are you doing here? If you’re gonna kill me, can you just get it over with?”

“What?”

“I saw you. Back in Utah. At the CVS. You’re a fucking were.” Stiles glares at Derek and spits, almost impressed when it freezes before hitting the ground. It makes him feel a little bit tougher.

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Right. Just like they didn’t kill everyone else.”

“If I was going to kill you, I would have done it long ago, Stilinski.”

His voice is rough, almost broken, and Stiles has never heard Derek talk like that before. Derek used to be all bite and anger and yelling, not concern and gentleness and even fear like he is right now. It’s scary but oddly comforting.

Stiles doesn’t know why, but he decides to trust him.

\--

They sleep together at night, sharing a sleeping bag, wrapped in blankets. Derek is warm, too warm, like an oven, but Stiles doesn’t mind. For the first time, he doesn’t think he will freeze to death every time he closes his eyes.

If sleeping next to Stiles is like sleeping with a pile of bones, Derek doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything about how sharp Stiles’s shoulder blades have become, how his jeans practically slip off his hips, how the skin is stretched tight over his skull. Instead, he just pulls Stiles closer at night, and rubs his arms until they aren’t frozen. Stiles falls asleep pretty quickly.

When he wakes up, pressed close to Derek, his arms wrapped around Derek’s neck, his face buried in Derek’s chest, Derek doesn’t say anything. They both get up and pack up the cart and start walking, like nothing happened.

\--

When the moon turns, Derek digs a ditch in the snow and tells Stiles to stay there, before he wanders off. Stiles spends the night wide awake, clutching his gun in his frozen hands, listening to Derek howl and snarl and race around, until it’s again and Derek comes back, exhausted and pale and bleeding.

They spend nearly a week without moving, because Stiles is worried about Derek’s cuts, worried that he might get an infection.

Derek tells him not to worry, that it’s nothing, but Stiles is insistent. For the first time ever, Derek listens to him and lets Stiles rip up old shirts into bandages and doesn’t complain about rubbing snow into the cuts in an attempt to clean them out.

\--

Eventually, the snow begins to melt, but Derek still holds Stiles close when they sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for death, gore, violence, etc.


End file.
